The present invention relates to a semiconductor memory allowing precharging circuitry thereof to rapidly precharge sense amplifiers and I/O (Input/Output) lines for thereby implementing rapid data reading and writing.
It is a common practice with a DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) or similar semiconductor memory to precharge bit line pairs connected to sense amplifiers and I/O lines before reading or writing data. The I/O lines are signal lines via which signals subjected to differential amplification are output from the sense amplifiers. Rapid precharging allows data to be rapidly written to or read out of memory cells.
Conventional semiconductor memories, however, have some problems left unsolved, as will be described specifically later with reference to the accompanying drawings.